Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an important element in making your website easy for search engines and users to understand and discover.

Content is essential for SEO as it helps the engines ‘read’ pages and trigger how it will be useful for users. In all content, you need to be targeting certain key phrases that you want to rank for on Google. The key phrases you try to target in your content need to be phrases that will bring targeted visitors to your website.

Remember – search engines are taking notice of social media. Incorporating a URLs presence on social media into their ranking algorithms. If a page is highly shared, it positively affects its search engine rankings.

Here is a snapshot of the current SEO climate in numbers:

1. There are over two billion people online – 38 million of them are in the UK

2. 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine

3. Google owns 68% of the search engine market share

4. 70% of the links search users click on is organic

5. 70-80% of users ignore the paid ads, focusing on the organic results

6. Search is the #1 driver of traffic to content sites, beating social media by more than 300%

7. SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate, while outbound leads (such as direct mail or print advertising) have a 1.7% close rate

8. 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results

9. The higher the rank position the better on Google: 18% of organic clicks go to the #1 position 10% of organic clicks go to the #2 position 7% of organic clicks go to the #3 position